With the proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, and in particular, the maturing of the World Wide Web (“web”), real-time conversations between conversation participants via their computer systems are becoming increasingly common. These conversations, which take place virtually over computer networks, are ever replacing the traditional face-to-face meetings.
Web conferencing applications are increasingly being used to conduct these virtual meetings. Typically, a person wanting to conduct a meeting, also referred to as a “presenter” in the meeting, schedules a meeting with a conferencing service. Alternatively, a meeting organizer can schedule the meeting with the conferencing service on behalf of this person. The person then invites selected people to attend the meeting by sending those people invitations. The invitation contains privileged information, such as a meeting time, meeting location—i.e., a universal resource locator (URL), meeting identifier, and meeting password, the invitee will need to be admitted to the meeting.
There may be more than one class of people in the meeting. For example, the person wanting to conduct the meeting may request one or more invitees to be presenters in the meeting. A meeting presenter has higher privileges than a meeting attendee. Moreover, the person originally wanting to conduct the meeting may or may not be a presenter in the meeting. In this instance, the person wanting to conduct the meeting can provide these invitees—i.e., the invitees who are requested to be presenters—with a different password to convey that higher level of privilege.
At a designated meeting time, the invited person uses a computing device to go to the meeting URL and submits the meeting identification and password to the conferencing service. The conferencing service verifies whether the person submitting the meeting information is authorized to attend the meeting, either as an attendee or a presenter. If the conferencing service verifies that the person is authorized to attend the meeting as an attendee, the conferencing service identifies the person as an attendee, launches an attendee console on the person's computing device screen, and adds the person to the list of people currently in the meeting. If the conferencing service verifies that the person is authorized to attend the meeting as a presenter, the conferencing service identifies the person as a presenter, launches a presenter console on the person's computing device screen, and adds the person to the list of people currently in the meeting.
One drawback to these conferencing applications is the use of invitations to invite people to attend a meeting. The invitations specify the time and location of the meeting and the password needed to gain access into the meeting, and separate invitations are issued for each meeting. When a large number of meetings are scheduled, sending out invitations for each of the scheduled meetings may become increasingly cumbersome and impractical. This is especially true in the instance where meeting are regularly scheduled, for example, at 10 AM every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in which case the invitations are likely to have a large amount of redundant information. Another drawback is that the conferencing applications typically admit any person submitting the proper credentials—e.g., a password. Because the invitations are sometimes transmitted or provided to invitees in the “clear,” the person may have obtained the password by unscrupulous means.
It would be desirable to have a technique that allows a person to invite people to attend scheduled virtual meetings without having to issue invitations to every invited person for every scheduled meeting.